Another image for the series. This one is featured in the "brainwashing" montage sequence of The Parallax View.

This famous picture of JFK in the oval office was taken by New York Times Photographer George Tames in 1961 and is titled "The Loneliest Job in the World." Tames on the photograph:

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

President Kennedy's back was broken during the war, when that torpedo boat of his was hit by the Japanese destroyer. As a result of that injury he wore a brace on his back most of his life. Quite a few people didn't realize that. Also he could never sit for any length of time, more than thirty or forty minutes in a chair without having to get up and walk around. Particularly when it felt bad he had a habit, in the House, and the Senate, and into the presidency, of carrying his weight on his shoulders, literally, by leaning over a desk, putting down his palms out flat, and leaning over and carrying the weight of his upper body by his shoulder muscles, and sort of stretching or easing his back. He would read and work that way, which was something I had seen him do many times. When I saw him doing that, I walked in, stood by his rocking chair, and then I looked down and framed him between the two windows, and I shot that picture.¹

More info is available/sources are available at the George Tames wikipedia entry. 

A Idea to get back to:

In my introduction, a history of the thriller is maybe necessary -- if only in order to offset the negativity of my issues with noir. This discussion could revolve around Chesterton, Todorov, and Martin Rubin. Rereading Rubin just now I am seeing that he argues, following Chesterton's idea about the mythic within the detective story, that the nature of the thriller's urbanity is to redeem the mundane and banal elements of modern life, to revivify them. I'm not quite sure I agree with this though. Isn't this even maybe a bourgeois kind of neo-flaneur position? As in: "I'm so bored with the city that I need a thriller to help me imagine that there's something sublime in city life." I'm not sure how strict he is about this, but it neglects the epistemological bent of urban thriller narratives, the way the provide knowledge about the city. No? 

Too busy writing to explore this stuff now, but: 

- The Seventies in America eds. Bailey and Farber contains a chapter entitled "Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York in the 1970s" by Peter Braunstein. 

- Mineshaft Nights is a memoir by Leo Cardini of time spent in the NY s&M club that Cruising was filmed in. 

A few notes to put here just in case they get lost in the shuffle:

-While filming Klute, Pakula describes Fonda as being constantly on the phone, organizing her political activities and speaking engagements. She was also, at the time, under surviellance by the FBI. I'm unsure if she is aware of this fact at the time. (Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography, p 22) - I think this information can orginally be found in The Films of Jane Fonda by George Haddad-Garcia. 

-Klute starts shooting in the spring of 1970. The scenes of Peter Cable in his high-rise boardroom feature cranes and a building that seem very likely to be one of the WTC towers! The cranes are in movement during the shot. 

Also, these two images. One of Nixon in 1972, the other, earlier, of Peter Cable in Klute. Did Gordon Willis come to DEFINE a particular mode of visual presentation, so much so as to be influential in how American presidents, however disgraced, could be shown that way? 

Edit: The picture of Nixon was taken by Ollie Atkins, presidential photographer, at Camp David right after the 1972 election, during which the events of Watergate were still unfolding. 

A trio of great articles, all coming out of McGill on crime, film, and city-space (they have, apparently, a crime and media working group). 

Ned Schantz writes "The Telephonic Film" (in Film Quarterly) arguing that it may be productive to see the uses and fantasies of the telephone in Classical Hollywood film as akin to the importance of the letter to the development of the novel. He concentrates on the presence but relative invisibility of the phone, glosses over some telephonic visual conventions, and does analyses of It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and Sorry, Wrong Number. May be interesting to extend these ideas - or the concept of telephonic film into "Post-Classical Hollywood." 

Thomas Heise is interested in crime, urban geography, and literature (also film, I think) and has a few interesting essays out, one on Chester Himes' novel Blind Man With a Pistol, "Harlem is Burning: Urban Rioting and the 'Black Underclass' in Chester Himes' Black Man with a Pistol" (African American Review, 41 [3]). The intro sets up the problematic nature of the term "black underclass" and how it is introduced into sociological and public discourse in the 1960s,  looking at a few different studies during that time, not just the Moynihan report. He argues that "in circulating representations of black pathology and in furthering a misguided policy agenda that alienated poor, urban African Americans, this discourse constituted the new racial and class formation it claimed merely to discover and describe: a black underworld trapped below the lowest rung of the class ladder in a culture of poverty, disease drugs, violence, and vice." (488).

Finally, I have not really followed Will Straw too closely, except looking at a recent book called Cyanide and Sin. He actually has quite a few interesting essays on urban visual culture, particularly as it relates to crime fictions. Have not quite worked through everything yet, but there is an interesting symposium paper about film and city skylines at the logocities website (out of Concordia), as well as an essay called "Cities of Sin, Backroads of Crime" which I believe is about representations of urban spaces in print culture of the 1950s.  

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Also, in an effort to jump start my work on Pakula and Klute I have been reading through some of the criticism. It seems that Klute was at the center of a mild debate regarding the path of feminist criticism. Most famously, Christine Gledhill argued in a two-part essay in Women in 

Film Noir that Klute's adoption of noir conventions works to constitute a definitively anti-feminist message (this, against a review of the film by Diane Giddis which proclaims Bree Daniels a feminist hero). Rafaele Caputo later (in Continuum, 1992, 5 (2), criticizes--correctly, I think--Gledhill for her reductive construction of noir. This being said, Caputo offers only a few words on Klute itself. There are a few essays on Klute as well in an early issue (Fall 1972) of Velvet Light Trap, but again, they look to be (I have not read them yet) of the same character. 

How is this useful to me? Is there something in the power of Klute to attract debates that may provide a good launching off point? 

My rough idea so far is to argue that Klute, and the other three films in the paranoia trilogy, offer a mediation on figure and ground. For American cinema, it might be said, a crisis of figure and ground was initiated by the dissolution of the Classical Hollywood model -- a model which prescribed cinematic conditions for relations between people and space and therefore, for the legibility of mise-en-scene and movement within it. If this is all thrown into flux so is, for example, the image of the woman. No longer is there a definable and institutionalized visual system within which woman is constituted (say, following Mulvey) within a visual field. But the dissolution of Classical Hollywood visual conventions creates a vaccuum. How then is a narrative film constructed? How does narration take place? One could say, as Gledhill does, that Klute assimilates a "European" tradition. But, as Caputo basically asks, what does that even mean? I would argue that the film more likely partially adopts a documentary style, but that we should also ask what is it we are seeing? None of the critics I have read so far (on Klute, or anything else) have considered the problem of a  noir IN COLOR. Darkness is as much a part of Klute, but so is a rich color palette. Instead of the familiar alternation between light and dark creating (perhaps following Gunning on Naked city, He Walked by Night, and the city that never sleeps) is an alternation between figure and ground. Between what we distinguish as a scene and what we read as a figure moving through a scene (i.e. a figure against a background).